Murder in the Adirondacks: Murderer Jean Gianini and the Insanity Defense

In 1914, Poland, New York, was a picturesque slice of small-town America. But that innocence was shattered with the shocking murder of beloved schoolteacher Lida Beecher at the hands of her former student Jean Gianini. At twenty-one years old, Lida wasn’t much older than her students. The son of a successful furniture dealer, Jean had all the advantages in life, but he had been labeled as different by all who encountered him.

“She wasn’t in her right mind.” “It wasn’t the real him.” “They didn’t know what they were doing.” Surely you’ve heard these claims before, whether from witnesses on the stand or from informants speaking to the press. In the aftermath of terrible crimes, supporters of the accused have often invoked the insanity defense—that the accused was not of sound mind, that the criminally insane cannot and should not be held to the same standards as the rest of us.

“Lida with friends at the Poland reservoir in 1913. Lida is third from left, wearing a huge smile. Courtesy Paula Johnson.”

Jean’s portrait as
he awaited trial.
Absent are his
glasses, which had
been discussed in
the trial as part
of the diagnosis
of his mental
condition. Courtesy
Herkimer County
Historical Society.

Thanks to the intrepid sleuthing of historian Dennis Webster, the story of that defense can now be told. In his bookMurder of a Herkimer County Teacher: The Shocking 1914 Case of a Vengeful Student, Webster— who waded through thousands of pages of court proceedings and archival documents in Herkimer County—takes his readers to a sleepy farming town that faced one of the worst crimes in its history on March 27, 1914: when the body of beloved young teacher Lydia (“Lida”) Beecher was found abandoned in a nearby wood.

Slain
by one of her former students from the village schoolhouse, Beecher’s murder
stunned not just the village but the entire county: sixteen-year-old Jean Gianini,
a delinquent young man from a troubled family, had lured her to an
out-of-the-way-spot in the woods, bludgeoned her over the head with a monkey
wrench, then stabbed her multiple times to ensure her death. Though he had
dragged her body some two hundred yards from the scene of the crime, once Gianini
had been arrested and jailed, key evidence left behind such as a stray button
from his jacket proved to secure his conviction. (Gianini had confessed, too,
but the legitimacy of his confession had been called into dispute).

With
such a grisly slaying, county prosecutors Charles Thomas and William Farrell sought
to make an example of the boy, by urging a conviction for murder in the first
degree and thus the death penalty. Yet Gianini’s defense immediately challenged
this notion, claiming that the perpetrator was an ‘imbecile,’ suffered from ‘progressive
idiocy’ and ‘feeble-mindedness,’ and had at most the intelligence of a ten-year-old.
They called experts in abnormal psychology—called ‘alienists’—repeatedly to
testify to Gianini’s capacities, including none other than the internationally-known
Dr. Henry H. Goddard, who had brought the Binet Scale of assessment from Europe
to the United States.

First,
developed in France, the Binet Scale was created to help measure the mental age
(not biological age) of children who had committed criminal acts, by assessing
vocabulary, reasoning, connection-making, and awareness of causes and
consequences. That Dr. Goddard deployed this test on Gianini broke new ground
in juridical history, as it was the first time ever in the United States that
the results of this test would appear in court. And not only did the judge rule
the results admissible—that Gianini had only the intelligence of a child—they
proved the deciding factor in the jury’s decision to spare him the electric
chair, and commit him to life in prison instead.

He used the Binet Test to classify Jean Gianini as a “high-grade imbecile” with the mentality of a ten-year-old.

While
the verdict was not surprising, the sentence was, and controversy immediately plagued
the aftermath of the trial. Whether Gianini was in fact an ‘imbecile,’ or
whether he was one of the best child actors in American history, remains open
to some debate: highly conversant, and even capable of writing coherent poetry,
Gianini was accused of hoodwinking the alienists, of pretending to be
simpler-minded than he was. But the sentencing stood, and at the age of sixteen
he entered the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in which
system he would spend the next seventy-four years of his life.

Though as Webster notes, the insanity defense doesn’t come up as much as it once did (it enjoyed a brief flare-up of popularity not long after its first success), it still appears from time to time in criminal proceedings, even in the modern age. Next time, then, that you’re following a trial, and the defense makes such a move, just remember the troubled young man from rural New York, the teacher so beloved by her students, and the legacy they never knew they left behind.

Jean Gianini leaving the courtroom on the last day of the trial. To his left is Sheriff Stitt, and to his right is Deputy Sheriff Hinman. Courtesy Town of Russia.

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Murder of a Herkimer County Teacher: The Shocking 1914 Case of a Vengeful Student

In 1914, Poland, New York, was a picturesque slice of small-town America. But that innocence was shattered with the shocking murder of beloved schoolteacher Lida Beecher at the hands of her former student Jean Gianini. At twenty-one years old, Lida wasn’t much older than her students. The son of a successful furniture dealer, Jean had all the advantages in life, but he had been labeled as different by all who encountered him. The shocking murder brought the world’s best alienists to the packed Herkimer County Courthouse to try to prove that the teenager’s mental development precluded his guilt. Author Dennis Webster utilizes unprecedented access to court documents to reveal details of the sensational crime never before made known to the public.